Anatole Litvak (1955)

Long-lost prints of films seem to turn up often enough and it’s to be hoped that one day soon a new copy or two of The Deep Blue Sea will be found.   For the time being, it’s a great shame that the film is virtually unobtainable and that anyone wanting to see a screen adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play will have no option but to watch Terence Davies’s 2011 remake.  As Jo Botting, curator of the BFI’s Vivien Leigh centenary season, explained in her note:

‘The BFI National Archive contains only one element and, as we rarely project material from the Archive for preservation reasons, we cast the net wider to try and track down a print elsewhere.  Nothing came to light at any of the US archives, or through any of the companies involved in the film’s production. … So, although our ex-distribution print is somewhat faded, with a few scratches and splices, we decided to digitise it to screen as part of our retrospective. …’

I found this rather shocking because I could remember watching Anatole Litvak’s film on television – I realise now that was probably several decades ago. I had the idea that I’d been taken with it then and that that was one of many reasons for disliking the Davies version.  (I’ve never seen the play on stage.)  Anyway, I’m certainly taken with Litvak’s film now:  the print the BFI showed really was in bad shape but the qualities of The Deep Blue Sea were still plain to see.

Although CinemaScope seems essentially wrong for what is a claustrophobic story, the opening out of the play works well (Rattigan did the screenplay).   The location filming in contemporary London – along the Embankment, where Hester Collyer and Freddie Page are living together in a poky rented bedsit, and in nocturnal Soho – is historically interesting now.  Sequences at an air show and in the Swiss ski resort of Klosters are worthwhile too, albeit less for the action in the air and on the slopes than for the conversations there between the principal characters, of whom you never get enough.  Kenneth More had played Freddie on the London stage and is alleged to have disliked filming with Vivien Leigh, regretting that she wasn’t Peggy Ashcroft, who’d played Hester in the theatre.  You would never guess from More’s marvellous performance that he’s uncomfortable:  remarkably relaxed, he draws on his trademark smug, blokish affability to create a man who is at first shocking in his selfishness, and finally very small.  More’s characterisation is bracingly different from the pallid, aestheticised Freddie of the Terence Davies version, played by Tom Hiddleston. (It was impossible to believe there’d ever been life in the relationship between him and Rachel Weisz’s Hester.)  We first see More’s Freddie returning to the flat on the Monday after a golfing weekend during which he’s forgotten Hester’s birthday and missed her suicide attempt.   He bursts in, bright and breezy then puzzled as to why she’s quiet and sad; he remembers the birthday – ‘Oh, Lord …!’   After a bit of conversation which doesn’t brighten Hester up, Freddie says ‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry – what more do you want?’  In fact, he hasn’t said those words or done anything else to suggest regret.   More is just as brilliant in later scenes when Freddie’s the worse for drink – when the contrast between his RAF bonhomie and his bitterness about the letdown of civilian life hardens into something potentially aggressive.

If that contrast is strong, the tension between Hester’s surface assuredness and psychological disintegration is sometimes almost unbearable in Vivien Leigh’s portrait.  When Freddie comes back from his golfing, Hester’s quietness is not a sulk that he forgot her birthday:  it’s a silencing realisation of the truth of their relationship and that she did the right thing trying to end her life a few hours previously.  Leigh’s Hester, much of the time, suggests emotional exhaustion; as a result, her occasional, always short-lived outbursts of anguish and the gulf between Hester’s present state of mind and her beguiling presence in the flashbacks to her first meetings with Freddie are very moving.  In the flashbacks, Leigh’s soignée sadness is shot through with excitement at the possibility of a life different from the one she’s stuck in as the wife of the High Court judge Sir William Collyer.    This version of The Deep Blue Sea is an example of how fraught with sex a film without sex scenes can be and the lack of physicality in the Collyers’ marriage is just as strongly expressed. As Sir William, an admirably controlled Emlyn Williams blends civility, considerateness and self-righteousness with great skill.  In the moment, during a scene at his Chester Square home, that Sir William realises Hester won’t come back to him even though she knows her relationship with Freddie is doomed, Williams is both utterly defeated and like a child who can’t get his own way – but a child who also knows the importance of good manners.  It’s the fact that he doesn’t give Hester any reason to be angry that helps to make her life with Sir William so intolerable.

Simon Russell Beale too was good as Sir William in the Davies film but the class distinctions between the characters register more clearly and the actors inhabit them more naturally in Litvak’s.  (It’s remarkable also that the man who made the clumsy Anastasia just a year later was able to create such nuanced scenes here.)   The acting style may in some respects appear dated but its apparent limitations resonate with the social constraints of the 1950s that are essential to the story of The Deep Blue Sea – the playing expresses those constraints. Hester’s outbursts are a good example of this:  it would look odd for an actress playing a contemporary character nowadays to switch emotions on and off as Vivien Leigh does.  (It was very interesting to see Blue is the Warmest Colour – and the realism of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s teary moments – in the same week that I saw The Deep Blue Sea.)   But Leigh concentrates so much emotion into so little screen time that she achieves a true intensity; she also suggests that a woman like Hester Collyer had likely been educated not to make a fuss – or not for long anyway.  On the whole, Vivien Leigh is much more emotionally precise in the role than Rachel Weisz was and I think I prefer what Leigh does in The Deep Blue Sea to her legendary performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (her previous movie – although four years earlier).   In Streetcar too she creates emotions of considerable force but it’s as if her sustaining of the same emotion through a succession of lines dominates them, makes the lines less individual.   Her readings are more supple in The Deep Blue Sea.

The role of Miller, the tenant of the flat above Hester’s, is a bit garish:  this ex-doctor – struck off and imprisoned for what one assumes to have been a homosexual offence – now makes his living as a bookie, at a time when off-course gambling hadn’t yet been legalised.  (I would put money on Rattigan’s using the kinship between Miller and Hester as a means of expressing what the writer saw as his own connection with both their situations.)   While Eric Portman’s readings are unvarying, that gets across how black and white things have become for Miller, whose cynicism and isolation allow him to speak frankly and penetratingly.  Moira Lister is obvious but entertaining as another tenant of the house, a nosey-parker resting actress; Dandy Nichols (the landlady), Arthur Hill (Freddie’s pal) and Jimmy Hanley (a pub landlord) all do well.   There’s only the odd melodramatic thud.  It’s a good idea to move into the courtroom immediately after Hester has told her husband of her affair with Freddie and Sir William, the complete professional, picks up where he left off when the court adjourned for lunch – during which time his world has turned upside down.  It’s a pity, though, that, when the court usher hands him a note from Hester confirming her departure, Anatole Litvak cuts away emphatically:  you want to witness Sir William absorbing that shock too before he presses on again.  But Litvak creates a very effective motion picture climax:  Hester, after her frantic search for Freddie in a succession of Soho bars, stands alone, back in the flat on the Embankment.  She has finally sent Freddie away, even when he came back, having lost his nerve to leave her.  Whether she has the courage to live without him is less certain.   She might be considering the advice that Miller gave her along with medication for the night following her suicide attempt:  ‘Take the sleeping pills, wake up tomorrow, go on living’.   Hester Collyer finally stands still because she can stop running around but also because she has nowhere else to go.

26 November 2013